Monthly Archives: December 2011

According to data from M Booth and Beyond, different product categories compel people to seek information and reviews from different sources on the web. Consumers tend to go the company website for electronics, they rely on search for travel and they go to discussion forums to see what people think about different car models. Consequently, consumer electronics companies better have a pimped-out website, travel brands ought to put some dough into SEO and car companies better pay attention to what people are saying about their vehicles’ performance.

The infographic below explains where consumers go for product information — suggesting to marketers that some aspects of digital marketing deserve more attention than others. Marketers, do these consumer behavior findings align with your experiences at work? And customers, do your actions mirror those in the study?

The first iPhone was actually dreamed up in 1983. This iPhone was a landline with full, all-white handset and a built-in screen controlled with a stylus.

The phone was designed for Apple by Hartmut Esslinger, an influential designer who helped make the Apple IIc computer (Apple’s first “portable” computer) and later founded Frogdesign. The 1983 iPhone certainly fits in with Esslinger’s other designs for Apple. It also foreshadows the touchscreens of both the iPhone and iPad.

Images of the 1983 iPhone have been circling the web for a while but there has been renewed interest in Apple’s early designs and history thanks to a peak inside Stanford University’s massive trove of Apple documents. The archives are a close-guarded secret but Stanford is starting to grant access to select journalists and organizations. The archives were donated in 1997 after Steve Jobs rejoined the company and document much of the design and personnel changes that took place in the 1980s.

The 1983 iPhone is just one of many prototypes buried in Apple’s past. There’s even a device that looks eerily similar to an iPad. Despite the phone’s age, it actually looks like a cool concept that could easily be updated into a modern consumer product by replacing simple stylus screen with an iPad-like interface.

As expected, the opening of year 2012 on Japanese Twitter was a full stream of new year’s greetings. After entering into 2012, Twitter, both site and API, went down by heavy load.

According to an unofficial Twitter traffic counting service TweetCounter showed that the peak tweets at the midnight January 1, 2012 in Japan Standard Time was 16,197 tweets per second.

The same TweetCounter counted 14,594 tweets when Japanese made the latest official record on an anime movie “Tenkuu no Shiro Laputa”(“Castle in the Sky” in US) , which was authorized as the record by Twitter official 5 days later. The official number was 25,088 tweets per second.